24 Jenuary 2020
Giorgio Gasco (Bilkent University, Ankara)
organized by Anna Bruna Menghini
The professional activity of Bruno Taut in Turkey between 1936 and 1938 includes 24 projects assigned by the Turkish Ministry of National Education, the teaching activity and the direction of the department of architecture in the Istanbul Fine Arts Academy, and the publication of his last book (Mimari Bilgisi – Theory of Architecture - Istanbul 1938). Many scholars, mainly German and Turkish, so far extensively investigated and discussed these topics. Nevertheless, some traits of the complex and sometimes contradictory architectural discourse of Taut in Turkey deserve further study. Among these, for instance, the very deep interest that eventually encouraged Taut to explore the work of Sinan, chief architect in the Ottoman court in the 16th century, and the vernacular form of the Turkish house, didn’t find yet a proper focus.
Bruno Taut has been actually one of the first architects of his generation to radically question the ideals of modern orthodoxy, and to attempt a revision able to combine the concepts of history, tradition, continuity, and place with those of modernity, innovation, and progress. Eventually in Turkey this attempt materialized in the realized projects and at the same time represented the core of the theoretical discourse produced within the book Mimari Bilgisi.
This lecture aims to illustrate a number of evidences, some of them unpublished, of the peculiar relationship Taut established with the local history and tradition, and in particular to emphasize his attempt to integrate the Turkish cultural legacy within that transverse idea of modernity he developed in the last years of his life.